After years of Mobile phone contracts that block you in a certain provider, a lot of people are used to treating the relationship as a marriage. But just because a particular carrier worked for you 10 years ago doesn’t mean it’s the best for you today. Different operators excel in different things, as new technologies like 5G appear, and if you move to a new city, the operator with the best signal may be completely different from where you lived before. If you’re tired of getting a terrible signal in your own home or getting slow at constant speeds when you’re out, it might be time to look at other carriers – there are more great options than you could make.
Don’t just look at the cover maps – dig deep
Carriers love to promote their coverage maps, plastered with red, blue or purple dots, to show you how many cities they serve. But carriers themselves are not impartial and reliable sources, and coverage is not a binary thing – just because your city has a red or blue dot doesn’t mean the service will be optimal.
So if you are looking for a new carrier, get as much independent information as possible. Opensignal, for example, is an app that allows users to send speed and signal tests across the country so you can see on a map how any of the four major carriers are doing. (You can also perform a quick speed test on your own to see how your connection compares and help feed the database to others).
Remember, coverage is only part of the equation. Signal strength, speed and latency also matter a ton. Opensignal covers those bases if you tap Network stats and swipe through its results for a specific location, but you can also look at things like PCMagAnnual coverage of the fastest mobile networks for an idea of how speed might vary from city to city.
If you want to really enjoy yourself deeply, though, you’ll need to ask yourself some good old-fashioned questions. See which carrier your friends use, ask nearby Facebook groups, and see if your city or town has a dedicated subreddit with experiences you could get. I’ve been to the big cities in the US, where my wife’s phone on one carrier would have full signal strength, where my identical phone on another carrier would float wildly around the city – coverage maps and common source tools they won’t always be able to tell you things like that.
And remember, a carrier’s coverage can change over time, so if someone tells you it’s terrible in that area, ask them when they last used it. (My family is still married to Verizon due to poor AT&T coverage a decade ago – even though the AT&T signal in northern Michigan has improved dramatically since then.) It may also be affected by what phone I use, so try looking for more trends rather than focusing too heavily on any opinion.
Look beyond the three big carriers
If you haven’t boarded the MVNO train, it’s time to look beyond Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile and try all the other big carriers that are there. While most US mobile phone coverage uses these three networks, there are dozens of mobile virtual network operators – or MVNOs – that use the same towers, while offering plans with cheaper or more unique pricing structures. You’ve heard their names before – Cricket Wireless, Republic Wireless, Ting, Straight Talk and others have been around for several years. But if you canceled them as carriers of discounts with poor service, you may lose.